George Galloway has inflicted a crushing humiliation on Labour as he made a sensational political comeback in a by-election he termed the "Bradford Spring".

The controversial Respect politician won a stunning victory in the Bradford West by-election, defeating Labour by more than 10,000 votes.The Tories were pushed into third place after the Budget backlash and fuel chaos, while the Liberal Democrats came fourth.
But it was Labour and their leader Ed Miliband who were left stunned and perplexed by the scale of their defeat and Mr Galloway's victory.Mr Galloway took over 55% of the vote share - double that of Labour, which lost around 20%.
In his victory speech, Mr Galloway invoked the series of uprisings that have toppled dictatorships across the Arab world as he called his victory the "Bradford Spring". {snip}

Shortly after the polls closed at 10pm, senior Labour MPs were telling Sky News they were "confident, but not complacent".
But an hour or so later, the same Labour MPs were getting the jitters as it became clear that Mr Galloway was polling much better than they expected.
By midnight, the mood in the Labour camp was one of deep gloom as the party's MPs began to predict a win for Mr Galloway and MPs from other parties forecast a big victory margin over Labour.
At around 12.30am, Mr Galloway claimed victory on Twitter, declaring: "By the grace of God we have won the most sensational victory in British political history."
Labour MP Toby Perkins said the result was "desperately disappointing", but pinned Mr Galloway's success partly on his celebrity status from having appeared on a version of reality TV show Big Brother.
Mr Perkins conceded, however, that his party had lessons to learn from the way Mr Galloway had been able to "capture the mood" of the electorate, especially young people. {snip}

It must be a huge humiliation for Ed Miliband and his team. We probably have not had our best 10 days - a difficult budget and a whole range of issues. But still, despite all that, Labour and Ed Miliband were not able to find any traction.-
Tory MP Kris Hopkins

The production of renewable energy in Scotland is an issue that has come to the fore in technical, economic, and political terms during the opening years of the 21st century. The natural resource base for renewables is extraordinary by European, and even global standards. In addition to an existing installed capacity of 1.3 Gigawatts (GW) of hydro-electric schemes, Scotland has an estimated potential of 36.5 GW of wind and 7.5 GW of tidal power, 25% of the estimated total capacity for the European Union and up to 14 GW of wave power potential, 10% of EU capacity. The renewable electricity generating capacity may be 60 GW or more, considerably greater than the existing capacity from all Scottish fuel sources of 10.3 GW. Scotland is on track to exceed its renewable energy target, set in 2007, for 31% of total power generation coming from renewables by 2011, and the 2020 target for the renewable share of total electricity generation has been raised from 50% to 80%.

Poet, publisher, scholar, dictionary-maker: Derick Thomson – or Ruairidh MacThòmais, as he was known in his native Scottish Gaelic – had an outsize influence on the language and culture from which he sprang.

Born and raised in the village of Bayble, in the remote Outer Hebridean Isle of Lewis, Thomson had a long career as Professor of Celtic at Glasgow University, and a parallel career as a publisher.

“It’s impossible to imagine the world of the Gaelic language without Derick Thomson – Ruairidh MacThòmais,” says Ronald Black, Gaelic editor for The Scotsman newspaper and editor of “An Tuil ,” an anthology of twentieth-century Scottish Gaelic poetry.

Black cites the 1951 co-founding of “Gairm” magazine as one of Thomson’s greatest achievements. The quarterly literary journal lasted more than 50 years, and launched many writing careers.

“It became the engine room for Gaelic literature, poetry and short stories in particular,” says Black.

“This is a man who produced a dictionary, who produced a book on biology, who produced studies of the language for the general population. He was a man who worked in a huge, wide variety of fields.”

Still, it’s for his poetry that Thomson will best be remembered.

“He transformed Gaelic poetry,” says MacNeacail. “He was the first Gaelic poet to work in free verse really, and that released people like myself into using the language in new ways, using new rhythms.”

That break from centuries of tradition, says MacNeacail, also opened Gaelic poetry to the influence of contemporary European poetry.

An islander who spent most of his life in the big city, Thomson’s work explored the theme of exile, and the tension between the old ways and the new world. In one of his poems, “Clouds,” he talks about the “gaiety” and “brashness” with which he left his island. Then, describing the landmarks that he misses, he ends wistfully: {SNIP}

WITH no cash, his cupboards empty and most of his furniture sold, Ruaridh Arrow sat in his kitchen for months, editing a film that he wasn’t sure anyone wanted to see. Three years later his stunning film, created in Inverness, has been seen by 10million people and translated into nine languages, including Japanese and Russian. It has been broadcast on major networks as far away as Australia and won Documentary of the Year at the Raindance Film Festival in London. And it has just scooped a Scottish BAFTA.

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His 93-page pamphlet From Dictatorship to Democracy is the definitive guide to how peaceful protest can topple even the most tyrannical regime. The booklet has turned up in places as far apart as Burma, Thailand, Bosnia, Estonia, Iran, Indonesia, Zimbabwe and Venezuela and now he is credited with formulating the strategy used in the Arab Spring. There are 198 methods of non-combat action, including tips on how to make a campaign look and feel cohesive. Tyrants have warned against Sharp’s “subversion”, the biggest compliment they could pay him. A war studies student, Ruaridh came across Sharp’s booklet when he was studying revolution.

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Ruaridh, 31, said: “I saw the same techniques replicated time and time again. At first I thought there was something really dodgy going on so I tried to find what the common factor was, and it was this little book. “Here was this old man sitting in a crumpled house in Boston and that is where revolutionaries go for advice. “It was one of the world’s great little secrets. It was a little bit of magic and I had to make a film about it.” Ruaridh had worked for Sky and Channel 4’s Dispatches but couldn’t get anyone to back his idea that Sharp would make a top documentary. “They kept asking me who this peace freak Gene Sharp was. I tried to tell them that his book was everywhere and it is really influential but they weren’t even interested.” But Ruaridh refused to give up. He quit his job, sold everything he could, took what little money he had and flew to Boston with a camerman.

The explosive report on the man convicted of the Lockerbie atrocity ...why we are publishing it after five years of secrecy

The Sunday Herald today publishes the full 800-page report detailing why the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing could have walked free.

The controversial report from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) has remained secret for five years because, until now, no-one had permission to publish it.

The Sunday Herald and its sister paper, The Herald, are the only newspapers in the world to have seen the report. We choose to publish it because we have the permission of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the bombing, and because we believe it is in the public interest to disseminate the whole document.

The Sunday Herald has chosen to publish the full report online today to allow the public to see for themselves the analysis of the evidence which could have resulted in the acquittal of Megrahi. Under Section 32 of the Data Protection Act, journalists can publish in the public interest. We have made very few redactions to protect the names of confidential sources and private information.

Click here to read the report in full (Visit the site to view the document)

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Some time ago, I read a newspaper column written by a then-expatriate Kenyan living in Johannesburg. At the time, Binyavanga Wainaina ‘s piece made me put down my coffee, set down the Mail & Guardian newspaper, and scribble his name into my notebook and onto the back of my brain.

His story was funny, true, insulting, provocative, disturbing, unsettling, true, accurate, hilarious… and true. Entitled “How to Write About Africa ,” Wainaina’s article created a handy guide for foreign journalists, bloggers, writers of books, film and TV documentaries and feature films heading off to the ‘Dark Continent’ of myth and lore in search of fame and fortune. Here’s a taste:

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai,’ ‘Zulu,’ ‘Zambezi,’ ‘Congo,’ ‘Nile,’ ‘Big,’ ‘Sky,’ ‘Shadow,’ ‘Drum,’ ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone.’ Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas,’ ‘Timeless,’ ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal.’ Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.
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The top rate tax cut gives a boost to 328,000 people, whereas the stamp duty hikes could at most affect 4,000 people – 1% of those at the top getting tax cuts. And that is if they all decide to sell their houses. In November 2011 a mere 121 homes were sold worth £2 million or more, 98 of them in London. Osborne presented this as a measured, pragmatic Budget, but his road of travel is clear. Millions of taxpayers may have had their thresholds raised, but massive public spending cuts and welfare cuts are coming, of which he said absolutely not one word.

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Why this is happening isn’t an accident of some supposedly insensitive Chancellor. It is a direct product of a broken British political system, and a Tory Party entrenched in the South East of England which knows little directly of the North of England, Scotland and other parts of the UK.

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British politics are now shaped by a set of dynamics which have been clear from the 1980s, the Tories unashamedly placing themselves as the party of London, the South East and the City. Cameron and Osborne are taking a bigger gamble than Nigel Lawson in 1987 and 1988, who rewrote the tax book on the back of rising incomes. This time the Tories have the Lib Dems as their human shields to provide some progressive cover.

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Yet in reality this Budget makes the case for Scotland taking as many economic levers into its own hands, to counter the truncating and distortive effects of Westminster politics and its South East obsessions. But just as importantly, it calls out for developing alternative economic ideas which break with the failed ‘Britain plc’ and articulate more than just making our own small Scottish version of this world.

{SNIP} Jimmy Reid’s ultimate membership of the Scottish National Party along with his radical roots in the Scottish working class acknowledges that he felt there were more possibilities for encouraging fundamental social change in anIndependent Scotland.In this respect, if Scotland has, as we are told, the visionary potential to lead the world in climate change targets and technology could it not also follow the moral precedent ofitsinfluential Enlightenment philosophersand become again, a ‘beacon of progressive opinion’, moral leadership and a catalyst for radical action? Indeed, the massive support for the Scottish National Party in the 2011 Scottish elections clearly indicates that the people of Scotland want change that will sustain better governance of their country and, with that, the real possibility that a Scottish Government in an Independent Scotland – given the optimum conditions for change – will endeavour to institute a ‘creative re-orientation of society’.

Being a life-long socialist and internationalist Jimmy Reid was also aware, like Burns, that seeking the freedom and brotherhood of all men and women went beyond national hopes and desires to the wider global community. These two aspirations are not only compatible butinterdependent and necessary in this war-torn, unstable world. Would Jimmy Reid – given the financial crash of2008 with its devastating political, social and economic consequences – be the first to acknowledge that his vision for ‘a creative re-orientation of society’ had to be widened to embrace the concept of a new global economic order; indeed a radical re-arrangement of capital and markets, far distant from the morally and economically bankrupt ideologies ofSoviet style communism and neo-liberal capitalism with its attendant and corrupting,materialist dominated culture?

Capitalism – in all its unbridled forms – has been exposed as an endemic canker in the body politic whose financial and economic tendrils penetrate and corrupt every facet of political and social life – both national and international – to the ultimate detriment of upholding ethical and moral values, the public good and democracy itself. Essentially based on a Thatcherite, self-serving individualism, unfettered capitalism and its ubiquitous mindset cares little for the common good and acknowledges institutionalised greed as its principal motivation and outcome, under the pretence that its practitioners deserve and receive the market value for their ‘performance’ and ‘expertise’, those very same skills that triggered the global financial crash.

The crucial question confronting governments and people in the Western world – given the fact that these same governments have generally capitulated to the seductive allures of capitalism’s persuasive lobbyists – is how to politically manage, control and fundamentally change an increasingly arrogant and corrupt corporate, financial and banking sector to benefit the public good as opposed to the personal enrichment and concentration of wealth, power and privilege in fewer hands, all at the expense of sacrificing dignified human values, codes of moral behaviour and the democracy that is necessary to defend them. {SNIP}